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There is a steady influx of new social networking sites on the internet. Twitter isn’t any different from these. Similar to all the other social media websites, it is a community where “friends” can let each other know what is going on in their lives and what they are doing. Post your immediate thoughts, announce your presence at a local event, tell the world what you think of current happening.

Many computer-savvy individuals know of Twitter as a social networking application, however, they may not be aware of Twitter as a kind of advertising media that can be used to pass along useful information to a particular target audience. As we all know, Twitter limits the tweet size to a maximum of 140 characters. So the messages you choose to send, although being very short, must still be able to create interest for your customers to open and read them. You can ensure that your tweets reach a large number of individuals by building up your network, and having many followers. The bigger your list of friends is, the more people you will have viewing your messages.

The first thing you need to do is sign up for a free Twitter account. This process is simple and does not take much time. It’s not necessary for you to even have your own website. All you need to do is pick a username and your account is ready. After you have your account is activated you’ll be able to invite other people, prospects or potential customers, to start following you. This is not a sales pitch, but just a promotion asking them to follow you. Nothing is mentioned about products or services when you are inviting others to follow you. A good way is to scour your email address book through Twitter and find your existing contacts/customers so that you can send an email to everyone explaining why and how they should start following you on Twitter. Most likely, a large number contacts won’t have to start up a Twitter account to come with you because they’re already signed up. Slowly the number of followers to your account will grow. As always, you’ll want to take care of your followers and treat them like gold. So how do you go about doing this? You can offer them special deals on a regular basis and provide them with useful information. For instance, a nice idea is to have “Twitter Only” promotional activities that give discounts to your followers. Theses discounts would be limited to those individuals who follow you. This way you will start to have people referring others to follow you and get their friends and family into your list just to take advantage of your offer.

The first thing is to get a Twitter account. It’s a necessity in driving traffic. Getting a Twitter account is completely free, and your contact list can be scanned to see if you already have people you know using twitter. Once you have an account, you customize it. Upload a photo of whatever you want, it could be you, a logo, anything. Be sure you link to the website you are trying to generate traffic for on your profile. Unlike Facebook or MySpace, Twitter only allows you the ability to upload photos on your profile, and to micro-blog, there is no storage for files or photos - save that for your site. However, you do have an opportunity to add your favorite pictures to share them with your friends using Twitter updates, either the regular way or mobile uploads. When you have set up your account with Twitter, you can start following people. Following people on Twitter means that you will be able to see all of their updates on your main page when they write them. If one of the people you are following tweets, you can see it on your profile page righ then. To follow a person, all you have to do is click on the button that says follow located below the picture on their profile page. This is a good tactic to drive traffic, because you will notice that the more people you follow, the more they will return the favor back to you by following you.

To make things a little more automated, you can take advantage of sites like Twitterfeed to connect your RSS feed to your Twitter account. This simply means that every time you update your RSS feed, it connects to your Twitter account and automatically posts there. This is quite a helpful way of making sure that whenever you update your site, anyone following you will receive that information. Don’t bombard people though, you wouldn’t want to be the latest spammer everyone hates. Be sure to supply plenty of your own commentary between automated updates. Marketers who want to have access to targeted traffic that can convert to sales have found that Twitter can really be a boon to their business. Thi method takes time and effort, but the more time you expend the better your results. With this in mind, take the time to be consistent and update your account on a regular basis. It will not take too long before you start to build a gathering and start seeing traffic to your site.

Keeping in touch with your followers is also essential in your ability to generate more traffic on Twitter. But, there are other ways to direct targeted traffic to your blog or webpage. The best part about Twitter is that you can tweet your updates and include a link in the update that leads people directly to what you are talking about on your site. It is easy to post an update that contains a link to the product website of any new product that you would like to promote. Over time, you will be able to design new strategies for promoting your business or blog and find more creative ways to introduce links into your tweets on Twitter, which will help draw more visitors to your site. Twitter is a relatively new social networking site, but it is a powerful tool. There is no limit to what you can do with Twitter. All that is necessary to see results with no delay is to combine a working sales plan with level headed thinking.

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As a part of the Web 2.0 evolutionary wave, social media and marketing have really come to the forefront of a professional marketing campaign. Facebook, which has crossed MySpace in popularity, has become the leading social network. It seems everybody you might know, no matter what age they are, can be found on Facebook. It’s dissolving boundaries and letting people socialize on one single platform. And this is of great benefit to internet marketers looking to capture the attention of a target audience. Facebook is a sophisticated tool to find that audience, and you’re really missing out on a prime traffic generating method if you aren’t on it. Millions of Facebook members use the website to keep up with their friends, meet new people, play some games and many other activities. With the amount of time that the average person dedicates to social networking, they still have time leftover to visit business sites and check out products and services as well. I am going to show you in this article different ways you can use Facebook in your promotions and tell you how it can make your business more successful.

No matter where you are, social networking is a viable way to communicate. Despite the Internet’s ability to allow people to interact in differing ways, none of these other methods seemed to have the effect that social networking has on creating connections between people. The largest and most popular of the entries into the new social networking phenomenon has to be Facebook. Facebook has become the de facto identity for people online that if you do not have an account it may seem like you are disconnected.Every day, people use their Facebook profiles to network with other people that have the same interests, play games together, and communicate on an unparalleled level. Doesn’t this look like a perfect place to find a customer for your product/service? You bet it is! There has been an explosion of advertising and marketing efforts that are initiated on Facebook as the industry gets a grasp on the reach of the platform. There are millions of users on Facebook and they have varied interests, which is a perpetual Goldmine for online marketers. This article will be talking about how Facebook can help you promote your business in the best possible way.

Once Facebook reached a couple million users, they began to monetize their service. Social Ads was launched, which allowed businesses to put ads on Facebook to promote their service or product. Other service like Google Adwords are harder to use than the simple format that Facebook has developed for you. Because of the ability to target users based on their gender, interests, age group and a lot more, the chances of your ads getting clicked on will greatly increase. The biggest concern when you’re running such ads is that you don’t want random people clicking on your ads. However, Facebook’s Social Ads and their advanced targeting feature, makes sure that your ads are only displayed to the demographic of your choice. You can get an increase of traffic on your site by making sure you have a higher click-through-rate. Another great way to get your ad noticed is to add a relevant picture or graphic that will grab your audience’s attention. Your ad will seem more forthcoming, reliable, and authentic, and will cause the eye to gravitate toward it.

You can also get a group or page of your own to begin marketing if you cannot afford the ads. With Facebook, you can set up an interest group, or what they call a page, for just about anything. There’s no cheaper way to get to your target audience. Just make a group that’s geared toward your business in particular, and start bringing people into it. Then you need to find people to join your group or become a fan of your page, it couldn’t get much easier. You can do this with a direct invitation and then those who you invite can invite others. But if you create a page, you’ll have to do your own marketing to get the word out about it. No matter what you want to do, from making a page of your own or creating a group, there’s no doubt that Facebook will increase the size of your audience.

You could consider Facebook to be a social network with meaning. If you use it right, Facebook can really help your business and assist in marketing your products and services to a fresh customer base. It will require some trial and error, but keep trying and you will find the Facebook method that will be just right for you and will bring you the success that you want.

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Many Internet business owners and webmasters spend a lot of their time and money struggling with Web design and SEO in order to reach the top of the search engines . They think that once they do, they will have access to the huge amounts of free traffic available there and they will be successful from then on. What many fail to realize, is every month a new horde of hungry competitors that include backlink building as a business growth strategy, is there to knock them back down a peg or two. Not to mention the periodic search engine algorithm changes that can suddenly cause their business to completely disappear from search engine view.

Getting other websites to link to your business website is one of the best ways to grow traffic and page rank in the search engines. Search engines rely heavily on the number and quality of backlinks to a website for scoring page rank. The more high pagerank websites you have linking to your website, determines the level of visibility and rank in the search engines and ultimately the amount of traffic and profits you will have. Link building should be a priority for any internet business.

Link building can consist of submitting articles, blog posts, comments or videos, with a link back to your site in the signature box or description, to authority sites such as popular blogs, You Tube, Myspace, Facebook, WikiHow, Squidoo and others. Also bookmarking sites like Mixx, Digg, Technorati, Mr Wong and others can give instant high value backlinks as well as getting an article or blog post seen on the front pages of search engines. Finding linking partners can help, although I would Strongly recommend avoiding link farms and exchanges, because search engines may punish those websites believed to be gaming the system.

Other ways of manually building links, are posting comments to high ranking blogs or Yahoo Answers, with your link in your signature file. There is a really awesome free resource that automatically submits an article or website content link to over 30 high pr social bookmarking sites and they have a free plug in for WordPress. After posting an article to your blog you can just click a button, after you set it up once, And 34 backlinks are automatically posted. This tool can generate a ton of free web traffic to any blog or website.

While there are thousands of resources to manually add a backlink to a website, it is not feasible to begin a link building campaign without a coherent plan and automation tools to eliminate the time consumption and drudgery of the necessary tasks. There are some great free tools and services available as well as some extremely effective low cost service solutions. It would be a wise decision to look into the back link building options available to internet business owners today.

In order to dominate the top of the search engines and insure rapid and long term business growth, it is important to utilize as many tools and services as possible to eliminate work and maximize profits. Fortunately, as effective as backlink building is to online business growth and generating free targeted traffic, many of the necessary time saving tools are free or very affordable to anyone needing to enhance their business visibility.

Link building should be the primary business growth strategy if free targeted website traffic is a desired outcome for your online business.

Want to find out more about building backlinks, then visit FreeWebsiteTrafficPro.com to choose the best free website traffic generation tools for your online business needs.

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Even as Facebook was just becoming a household name, Twitter burst onto the scene, and has rapidly become one of the hottest social networking sites on the web today. It has taken a while for Internet marketeers to understand this incredibly useful marketing tool, especially as originally Tweeting was just regarded as an activity for socializing, as is texting. That’s not to say that every marketer has successfully capitalized off of this growing site, however. Good marketing is good marketing,whether it be a billboard or Tweet. You can definitely avoid these mistakes, though if you’ll just use some simple precautions before you start marketing on Twitter. Remember that Twitter is considered a social platform, so it’s very public and can easily give your business a wide exposure. Remember that Twitter marketing should be utilized intelligently, and do not forget that it can be abused if you are not cautious. We will cover a number of pitfalls to watch out for while marketing with Twitter in the following article.

The first and foremost mistake people make when marketing on Twitter is to, well, start with marketing. The worst outcomes, as contradictory as it may seem, start by introducing yourself as a profiteer. In the initial stages, your focus should on building strong relationships, winning the trust of people and being visible. By making these efforts, you will essentially receive permission from your market to proceed with your promotion. How do you take this permission? In participating and socializing as much as possible on Twitter. As you take part in the Twitter community and establish sociable relationships, you will come to be trusted - then, and only then, should you start to create a list of prospects and promote your product to them, thereby increasing the number of visitors to your site and your sales. Be extremely outgoing and friendly and make sure to use it daily. Do not be too mercenary and focused on business in your tweets, and don’t turn them into uninteresting advertisements. Yes, you have to be serious about marketing, but you need to add a dash of humor to it. It is a good idea to be natural and reveal your great personality. By assisting the audience in an entertaining method, they will appreciate you and will begin to trust you more over time. Be engaging and easy to deal with, that’s the secret to winning their hearts.

Sending spam in the form of tweets to the Twitter community at large is undoubtedly the greatest misstep individuals make while using the platform, as Twitter users will overlook such tweets. Conveying information in a brief, uncomplicated manner, tweets should be similar to a dinner conversation carried on at your evening meal. People who login to Twitter want to have some fun, have a good time by socializing. When they notice that they are being faced with spam, a sales pitch from someone they don’t even know, they instantly feel negative about it. The solution? Present yourself as a guest looking to enjoy their dinner time chat with them rather than blatantly sell to them. In every way possible, these tweets must be useful. Of course that doesn’t mean you aren’t able to promote through your tweets. You just need to provide your followers with a significant value before you send them marketing tweets. If you alternate between valuable ideas and some suggested products that you endorse, this will be received much better by the intended audience. With suggestions and endorsements instead of hard core advertising, you can effectively market with Twitter. This is, after all, a social network. With that in mind, be sociable. Be a person -not a corporation. A face, not a business. If you are able to be totally real and helpful in your approach, people will be willing to buy.

The first mistake to avoid is thinking that the people on Twitter are not smart - especially when it comes to spam. So if you intend to just spam people using Twitter, you will find yourself wasting your time constantly trying to gather new followers because your old followers will dump you quickly. When you tweet, it’s a powerful way to send out a message. Of course, if you do not present it correctly, your message does not come through clearly. Twitter is a social network, and the people who participate view it as such and do not want to be spammed with promotional advertising through such a medium. Keep in mind that, for those people who follow your sentiments, your Tweets need to be highly beneficial and give them a sense that they have learned something. Also, you need to remember that it will take some time to build trust with your followers. You’ll want them to see you as an expert in your field before you start trying to promote or sell them something. Actually, promotion is not a word that works well with Twitter, it really is all about recommendations here. Your best bet is to mix any recommendations (i.e. product promotions) into other tweets that you are sending out that provide information on a continuous basis. This technique will assure you profits from your recommendations and also shows that you know what your followers and the rest of the Twitter community expects.

As with any community, Twitter thrives on conversations among a variety of types of people. If you’re a dedicated marketer with a one-track mind focused on your sales, and your tweets are simply promotions for your product, you won’t get many followers or make many sales. So avoid this blunder if you hope to achieve success over the long haul. As you engage in a variety of conversations in the Twitter community, you will have the opportunity to establish yourself as a real authority in your particular market. Forging acquaintances with Twitter is not difficult. By building a group of similar minds behind you, a devoted crowd will gradually develop that will be keen to any tweet you send their way.

By avoiding the above Twitter mistakes, you can start making some money from Twitter. Recently I created a Sales Page Theme, Magic Article Rewriter twitter accounts and I was able to build up a ton of followers for it.

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Is Your Online Branding Important?

As the social spaces grow, there are more opportunities to increase your brand awareness and build on solid customer referrals, but the flip side is that there are additional opportunities for negative publicity. For this reason, businesses should be very aware of their online reputation and how this can affect their position within the SERP’s. As search engines push for more personalized, user based results, consumer attitudes and recommendations become more important, and help to shape your brand online. Don’t waste this opportunity to manage your brand with Social Media.

As a business owner, you should be concerned with your online brand, and it’s important that you carry a consistent message and control the information that can be found online. There are literally thousands of online mediums where a consumer can praise you for excellent work, or bash you for sub-standard service. Your responsibility is to monitor and know what is being said about your business online, and respond in a timely manner to either praise, or criticism. The following steps will make your job easier and keep your brand out of the gutter.

Using Social Media to Manage Your Brand - 4 Quick Tips

Use a company logo or the picture of your PR rep for your Avatar. This will help you to make sure that you have a consistent image across all social sites, and ensures that the image associated with your social presence is worthy of representing your company.

You want all images associated with your site to be the same, or at least managed by your team. Control is the name of the game here, and you want to make sure that the images that will be associated with your business can be taken down at a moment’s notice, and that they do not portray your business negatively.

Keep your eyes and ears open - Monitor your company name, blog and industry. Social news spreads fast - good, bad or otherwise. It’s important to monitor your company name, web address and social profiles, and it’s equally as important to respond quickly when someone questions or challenges your reputation. It’s often possible to resolve disputes if you respond quickly, and before the negativity spreads. Tools for monitoring your name or web address include Google Alerts and Twitter Search, among others.

Avoid accidental branding - It’s easy to wander through the social media scene without a clear cut message or purpose, and it’s also a bad idea. Everything you publish online is visible to the public, and remains there as long as the web property is live. Make sure that you are in control of the message you are delivering, and ask yourself if your post or image is something you would want a family member, friend, potential employer to find. If the answer is NO, then you probably shouldn’t publish it. People lose their jobs over Facebook pictures or blog posts, don’t let that happen to you or your business.

Want to start a Social Media Campaign to Help Your Brand?

For building relationships online and promoting your business, social media sites may very well be the best thing since email, but you have to do it the right way. Rather than jumping blindly into social media, it makes sense for a business to strategically plan their course of action and take into consideration the big picture.

Social media can reap huge benefits for the right business, with the right approach. Make sure that you are setting for the correct plan for social media so that you can not only manage your brand, but create lasting relationships with your consumers that will resonate for years.

It’s better to avoid social media than do it wrong. Hopefully these tips will help your business get started!

Want to find out more about Social Media Brand Management, then visit HighPoint Search Marketing to see all of our Search Marketing solutions.

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Any successful online business must first have a plan of action before it starts up. Make your plan great using these online marketing strategies. Design and then promote your own personal web site for the business.

Develop a site to get in the top rankings of popular search engines by the use of great SEO content. Use email marketing as well to enhance your business and flow of traffic to the site.

SEO content can be found online through many reputable SEO companies. They charge a minimal fee for high quality professional content you can then use on your site and within other news and article venues. Have a contests monthly and offer up a great prize. People will have to visit the site for a chance to win and that’s more web site flow for you in return.

Blog about your items and services and your new items and services. This lets customers want to tune in each day to see whats new with you and the business. Interact with them as much as possible this way. This builds long standing partnerships and dedicated customers who will return.

Any items you have in the web store should be original and different from what people have seen before it should also serve as something everyone could use as well for the most success. Place SEO article on your site and keep them rotated and new with informative information but interesting too. Readers will keep coming back to the site to read the updated versions and probably buy one or two or more items while there.

You will start to see more and more customers flowing through the site everyday and you have these excellent online marketing strategies you have followed to thank for it along with your hard and dedicated work.

The truth about business strategies is finally revealed! Visit us at Online Marketing Strategies to get all the free insider information.

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If you wish to learn more about internet marketing, online marketing you will find that there is no one definition of what this form of marketing is. In fact, in its earlier days, internet related marketing simply meant creating an online site or using banner ads on different online sites. All that has changed because nowadays internet related marketing is all about selling programs which has allowed people to make considerable sums of money.

In fact, Internet marketing, online marketing have evolved into a wider activity as companies have now found it possible to use the best online based marketing methods which in turn have helped to dramatically increase their sales. It is therefore not surprising to learn that today, companies are creating their marketing strategies to specifically deal with use of marketing through use of the internet which today is a very important component of every modern company’s marketing plans. In fact, for certain kinds of Internet businesses, internet-based marketing is their sole marketing option.

It will therefore pay to look at the different objectives of a good internet-based marketing plan which of course will involve things such as communicating company messages more effectively and conducting research and it also means selling goods and services as well as even advertising space online.

There are several components involved in every Internet-based marketing plan including having to start with a website and then following that up with good (SEM) Search Engine Marketing and it also means making use of email marketing campaigns. In addition, marketing through the internet also involves using banner advertisements as well as creating online press releases and doing article marketing.

To succeed in internet related marketing you must begin by creating a useful website which will prove to be very useful even when you are doing business locally.

There no doubts the fact that unless you use a website you will not be able to grow your business and even a home business will profit from using a website which helps to provide greater exposure to your business and its products and services.

The Internet has changed our lives considerably and it has certainly revolutionized home businesses in particular which means that if you are running a small home business you must be well aware about what Internet-based marketing and/or online based marketing is; otherwise you will not be able to improve your sales and earn better profits.

Online internet marketing and especially SEO are becoming a core marketing component for most businesses.

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Technique 1: Search Engine Optimization

The mistake many website owners make is not spending time on Search Engine Optimization or SEO. In order to conduct a successful SEO campaign you must identify your target market, determine what keywords or phrases your prospective patrons are likely to search, and optimize your website accordingly. To reap the most out of SEO you must have a clear understanding of how and why it works. Without this your efforts will be in vain. Learn and implement search engine optimization methods.

Technique 2: Link Building

Once your website pages are appropriately optimized, your next step is to raise your link popularity by building as many quality inbound links as you can. There are lots of ways to fulfill this mission. First, submit your website to as many reliable Search Engines and online directories as possible. Next, exhibit your savvy by writing articles related to your website and submit them to top article directories. Write and submit press releases to top press release directories. These efforts will create long lasting back links heightening your website’s presence.

Technique 3: Social Media

People receive a great deal of their information online from search engines and social media websites. This is why it is essential for you to join leading social networking and social bookmarking sites. Fill out your profiles completely and add applicable content including a link back to your website. The main element to using social media is interaction. Go beyond posting information about you and your business. Give to each of the the networks you join by socializing (interacting) with other members. You don’t have to tell your life story, but it is essential that you participate in some way to these communities by being social. This is truly the only way to obtain high traction from your social media marketing efforts. After all, that is why they are dubbed as social sites.

With so many websites being started every day, you have to take an assertive approach to make yours stand out among the rest. Use these 3 straightforward techniques constantly and watch your website soar to the top.

For more information on these techniques and how to rank your website on the top SERPs or if you want us to get your website ranked, visit Champion SEO Consulting SEO Internet Marketing Services Get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service

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You’ve probably heard of affiliate marketing before, although maybe not by that name. It’s also known as a partner, sponsor, or associate marketing. If you’ve never made use of affiliate marketing, but you have a business to run… well, now’s the time to get cracking. You’re missing out on a new breed of marketing that is changing the landscape of business forever.

Affiliate programs are a way for companies to offer a share of their revenue with merchants who chose to participate in their program. Affiliate members bring in new contacts for the company by generating traffic via advertising. As an online affiliate a website will generate new sales, leads and other types of contacts for a company by posting ads for that company on their web page. Affiliate programs on the web are very popular now, because they require virtually no upkeep to maintain. Almost every major company on the Internet now offers an affiliate program.

With the help of the internet, affiliates can get information on the traffic they influence almost instantly, and get paid in similar lightning speed. With digital means of money transfers, like Paypal, sending money becomes less of a hassle for the merchant as well. In fact, the whole process can be automated, and often is.

This has highly curtailed the time that an affiliate marketer needs to wait for his payments to be collected from the merchants. Today, both the merchants and the affiliates can see clearly that affiliate marketing can work for both of them. The merchant sees affiliate marketing today as the chance to advertise their products at a lower cost. The affiliates, on the other hand, sees affiliate marketing as an easy way of earning profits online by doing what they like most, and that is by creating websites.

Before we had the net, affiliate marketing was clunky and difficult to use effectively. But now, with online systems of connecting businesses, managing money, and displaying ads, affiliate marketing has really come into its own as a force to be reckoned with. No more is affiliate marketing a second-class marketing technique. In fact, it has become quite possibly the most profitable form of marketing to date, given the minimal expenses and trouble involved.

How do you know what type of affiliate program will work best for you? Are all of these marketing programs the same or are there programs that operate better than others? Do they all offer the same advantages and benefits?

To whet your appetite, here’s a quick glimpse at some of the more popular kinds of affiliate marketing. Pay-Per-Click marketing allows you to pay affiliates for each click a visitor makes to travel from the affiliate to the merchant site. Other means of determining payment, such as when a visitor listens to an ad (called Per-Per-Play) or actually buys your product (known as Pay-Per-Performance), are also available. Choose what works best for you and you can be making money hand over fist in no time flat. Remember, every moment you spend not making the most of your company’s potential visibility is a moment where you just lost a customer. With how easy the net makes it nowadays, you have no excuses.

Justin Harrison is an internationally recognised Internet Marketing Expert and entrepreneur who has built up multiple 7 figure online business and consults to some of leading online brands including Amazon, BBC, AIG and many others.

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• Work From Home » Blog Archive » Marketing Your Business Online

The online portfolio is one of the most important assets for any web designer or web developer (not to mention other professions like photographers). A good portfolio site is capable of being the leading source of new clients, which is the lifeblood of any service-related business.

Although online portfolios are critical to the success of designers and developers, getting exposure for a portfolio site is difficult because there are simply so many of them. With so much competition it is critical that you consider how you will market your portfolio, rather than simply putting it up and waiting for people to come see it.

In this article we will discuss some of the basic things that you can do to get more eyeballs on your portfolio site, and ultimately more business.

1. Make it Search Engine Friendly

Search engine optimization is a very large topic that involves a lot of different aspects. The structure of the site itself is just one aspect, but it is an important foundation. You can give your portfolio site a chance to get decent rankings by making it easy for search engines to crawl the site and determine what it is about.

To make your site search friendly, use valid code that is clean and well-organized. This includes proper use of headings, and choosing not to do anything that will trick search engines or make it difficult for them to crawl your site.

2. Use Effective Page Title that Include Your Keywords

One of the most important factors for search engine rankings is the page title, so give plenty of attention to the titles that you use. Think about what people will be searching for and what will help them to find you.

Use specific phrases rather than targeting general keywords like “web design” or “web designer.” There is simply to much competition for general keywords to realistically have a chance at ranking at the top of the search engines.

Consider specific words and phrases such as “e-commerce web design.” This is descriptive of the services provided but will eliminate a lot of competition as compared to more general keywords, meaning you will have a better chance for a good ranking.

3. Don’t Forget About Localities

One way to make your website stand out is to optimize it for local searches. For example, instead of targeting the phrase “web designer,” try targeting “Philadelphia web designer.” This will drastically decrease the competition that you have for search rankings and it is something that local clients would actually search for.

4. Build Links

Along with the page title, links from other websites are as influential to search engine rankings as any other factor. In a way, search engine rankings are a bit of a popularity contest. Google views a link as basically a vote. When you link to another website you are essentially endorsing it.

If you want to dominate the search engines you will need to focus your efforts on getting links from other websites. There are any number of approaches you could take for a portfolio site, but here are a few:

Start a blog - Putting a blog on your domain is a very effective way to start getting links. Bloggers link to other bloggers quite frequently, so blogging and getting connected will certainly help here.

Social media marketing - social media sites provide outstanding opportunities for exposure to large audiences and link building. Articles that “go viral” will draw a ton of in-bound links for your site.

Link exchanges - Exchanging links with other designers and bloggers can also help.

Submit to galleries - If your site has a high-quality design you may be able to get a lot of traffic and links from web design and CSS galleries that showcase sites.

5. Make it Attractive

If you want your site to be featured in the best website galleries you will need to design something that is truly special. Be sure not to rush, give yourself enough time to do the very best work that you can. If it is good enough it will make the rounds through design galleries and bring a lot of exposure for you and your portfolio.

6. Give Something Away

One popular way for designers and design bloggers to gain exposure and links is to give things away for free. You could give away a free template or theme that you designed, an icon pack, Photoshop brushes, or just about anything thing else that will be useful to others.